With a historian's grasp of events and a novelist's ear for story, Fergus M. Bordewich has written a grand epic of American history — focusing on the sixty years leading up to the Civil War, which brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But its beginnings can be traced to a clandestine alliance of both black and white abolitionists and slaves, who joined forces to lead tens of thousands of enslaved Americans to freedom in a movement that occupies a legendary place in the nation's imagination, but about which little has been known until now.